getting a little southern back in my system

Today we went on a southern culture blitz. we began our day with a visit to the sweetgrass festival. The sweetgrass festival is an entire festival devoted to the sweetgrass basket.

the sweetgrass basket was a traditional slave basket used in the fields for gathering various crops. Today the tradition of weaving sweetgrass baskets can be traced through generations back to africa.

I love these baskets and have been fascinated with them for a long time. Like the quilts of geez bend however the actual sweetgrass basket today is an extremely prized art object. the festival wasn’t so much an educational or celebratory event as it was a collection of 20 or 30 different peddelers each with a slightly different spin on the tradition of basket weaving. To give you a sense of the value of the baskets the average basket is $900, with some as much as $3000, and smaller ones $100-$300. I have mixed feelings about this phenomon, on the one hand these are trmenedous displays of craft but on the other hand until the collectors showed up these weavers would never have signed their work with a sharpie. but I digress. Our next stop in bewteen looking at wedding locations was the charleston farmers market. at the farmers market I had my first barbecue sandwich last year and it was good, I even think my accent came back after i finished it.

the barbecue sandwich

After spending the rest of the day looking for wedding sites we returned to the island and walked to Poe’s tavern, named for Edgar allen poe, who once lived here. Tomorrow brooke leaves for her class in pennsylvania and I am going to began setting up my studio.